When Keith Richards arrived to take a photo with Santi Dorazio, opened a bag of cocaine with a six-inch blade and offered some to the photographer, how could Dorazio refuse? Working with rock stars, models and movie stars, his attitude has always been, “If you do it, I’ll do it,” he tells the Observer. The same is true when it comes to smoking marijuana in Harrison Ford’s trailer or meeting Mickey Rourke at 5 a.m. for a spontaneous photo shoot. He was never one to turn down a good topic or a good time. His closeness to his models, which seems to be the secret of his success in photography, comes from “just being open as a person.”
Dorazio is an open book, his diary, Shot in the darkpublished by Blackstone last year, offers a close-up look at his most revealing moments—the salacious and the dangerous, the seductive and the unfortunate. On the surface, the 70-year-old photographer lived a charmed life, or at least a charmed-adjacent life. Working for magazines like Vanity Fair, GQ, and Vogue, he photographed everyone who was in film, music, fashion, and celebrities in the 1980s and 1990s: Elton John, John Travolta, Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Willis, Cher, Pink, Prince, and Sophia Loren. But while he makes his living shooting for fashion magazines, his real subject is the nude — “the lingua franca of art history,” as he puts it. “I worship the divine feminine. Over the years, we have developed the symbolism of the divine feminine through goddesses: Isis, Venus, Diana, Mona Lisa. And in pop terms, even Marilyn Monroe. But for me, it was Pam Anderson.”
As Dorazio was keen to point out, both in his memoirs and in conversation with us, life in the fast lane is not without its speed bumps. “That’s why I wrote the book,” he says. “I want people to know that not all that glitters is gold.” Having worked in fashion magazines, he understands better than anyone that fashion images are largely deceptions, hiding a harsher truth beneath sun-kissed skin and designer dresses.
Born in 1956 to Italian parents, Santi grew up in Brooklyn surrounded by an eclectic mix of people: “Italians, Jews, some Irish, other minorities” but also “pockets of low-level gangsters.” Although there was an artistic lineage in his family—his mother had been an opera singer before the war—Dorazio was introduced to art through the church and its Catholic iconography, an interest not shared by many people in his early circles. “No one ever talked about Leonardo,” he writes. Shot in the dark“Unless you mean the pizzeria down the block.”
After studying commercial art and hating it, he enrolled at Brooklyn College to study fine arts, which was “pure heaven.” Fortunately, photographer Lou Bernstein lived nearby, and one day, he asked a young man from Dorazio if he wanted to learn photography. At the age of nineteen, he joined Bernstein’s Friday night classes, where the photographer taught a school of photography influenced by philosophy, specifically the principles of aesthetic realism. “Basically, the premise is that the way you see the world is the way you see yourself,” Dorazio explains. “You can analyze yourself through the images you create or are drawn to, because everything is really a self-image.”
Fifty years later, he still believes that everything he creates is a self-portrait. Whether he’s shooting Mike Tyson or Nicole Kidman, a fashion campaign or nude, he sees himself even in his most detailed images. However, stylistically, most of D’Orazio’s pictures are simple: a single model, unadorned, with minimal props. (When there are props, you He notices (As is Mike Tyson’s pet tiger or the skull carried by a naked Axl Rose.) In terms of setup, he’s equally frugal: one camera, one lens, and usually just one assistant. His photographs were not the kind of stuffy editorial images that look like movie sets. This simplicity, in addition to his tendency to relate to his models, is what explains the intimacy of his photographs. “How do you get someone to open up? You open up first,” he says. Even in his commercial shoots, Dorazio sees himself and his upbringing, “My mother is very religious and my father is a pagan. Life and art are the same thing. My father has Playboy magazines downstairs and my mother prays three times a day upstairs, those are two sides of me. I let them work.”
Shot in the dark He presents two seemingly contradictory sides to Dorazio: the one that seeks pleasure and the other that endures pain. He has a large number of stories of adventure and daring: being arrested in Thailand, burning down a hotel in Mexico, and an unfortunate drug scam in the Amazon. He also, by his own calculations, spent time with every drug, at every party, with every celebrity. “The irony is that I was operating in the light, but emotionally I was living in the dark,” he writes. Dorazio suffers from depression, which he says he inherited from his mother, and as with many artists, creativity is part of his treatment. “Photography has always helped me get out of those dark periods in my life. But in those dark periods I also became more sensitive to the world. If I don’t create, I hurt myself – not physically, but emotionally. That’s when things get dark.”
In recent years, he also suffered from physical health problems. In his early 50s, he contracted E. coli and was placed in an artificial coma. At some point, he had a stroke and was technically dead. After the coma, he dealt with PTSD for five years. Add to that a list of other physical ailments – two failed knee surgeries in as many years. After those surgeries, “I couldn’t shoot, and I couldn’t tie my shoes sometimes. I was in constant pain.” He was prescribed OxyContin, which led to his addiction. “I fell off the charts, so to speak, as a photographer,” he admits. “But I went back to drawing. I was able to paint. I was able to create. That was the healing process.”
Now 70, Dorazio says he’s ready to take on new tasks, although he has a clear vision of how the industry is changing and is quick to say that advertising has “taken a back seat” and he’s not interested in “great photography anymore.” Despite this, he did not lose his enthusiasm or his belief in the power of the image. “I am ready to shoot at any time,” he says. “And if no one calls, I call myself.” The former bad boy may live a quieter life these days – his vices are cigarettes and the occasional drink – but his passion for photography remains as passionate as ever. He says that not a day goes by without him photographing or drawing. After a life full of celebrations, he’s still attached to one thing: creativity.
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